1. Field of Invention
The field of the invention is a wizard which creates another wizard, which in turn enables an application computer program to interact with industrial controllers or sensors with certain specified characteristics.
2. Description of Prior Art
The use of application software, running on personal computers, to perform engineering computational tasks is becoming common. Such computational tasks require data values to be collected from engineering and industrial equipment. Manufacturers of the engineering and industrial equipment, and other companies, often provide software, sometimes called servers, that presents these data values to de-facto interfaces with the main application program. The application software needs to link to these servers through the de-facto interfaces. It is a difficult and time-consuming task to set up the application software to link to these servers. The problem is that the user of the application software needs to know the names and identifiers chosen by the manufacturer of the server software. There have been several methods proposed for solving this problem.
One approach is to use help systems and documentation. The help systems and documentation may be supplied by both the manufacturer of the server software and the manufacturer of the application software. The user of the application software has to examine the various help systems and documentation to discover the names and identifiers chosen by the manufacturer of the server software. The disadvantage of this approach is that help systems and documentation are often voluminous and do not guide the users through the task which they are attempting to complete.
Another approach is for the manufacturer of the server software to provide a browsing capability as part of the de-facto interface. The application software users can browse through all the possible names and identifiers that have been chosen by the server software manufacturer and make a selection when they find a required name or identifier. The disadvantage of this approach is that the users are still not guided through the task which they are attempting to complete. A second disadvantage of this approach is that the users must perform the browsing operation for each and every name or identifier that they are setting up. Often the names and identifiers that need setting up differ only slightly from each other.
An approach to overcoming the two disadvantages of the browsing approach is to use wizards. These wizards are programs and are part of the application software (or, hereinafter, application program) and are provided for the most common servers from the most common manufacturers. A wizard guides the user through the task of setting up the application software to properly interact with the server software. A wizard asks English-like questions, or questions in other suitable languages, and is aware of the slight differences in the names and identifiers chosen by the manufacturer of the server software. The wizard asks as few questions as possible to be able to complete the task of setting up the application software for the user.
The disadvantage of this approach is that wizards are often written in programming languages. Since the wizards are written in programming languages, they require programmers to write and alter them. A second disadvantage of this approach is that it is not a comprehensive solution since wizards are often not created for less common servers from less common manufacturers. There is a need for an intuitive means of creating and altering a wizard without requiring a programmer.
Representative of prior art is U.S. Pat. No. 5,859,637, to Leonard D. Tidwell, II, Jan. 12, 1999. In that invention, the human wizard creator manually composes a script in a disk file with a standard ASCII text edit program. The script is in a predetermined format. It uses a script-like language containing a predetermined set of commands. The human wizard creator must understand the format of the script file. The script is interpreted by a computer program when the script runs. The computer program uses the script to generate a wizard. The human user uses the wizard to enter information and to interact with an application program. In the invention of this application, the human wizard creator uses a computer program to create the wizard. The computer program itself stores a definition of the wizard in a disk file. The disk file is not edited directly by the wizard creator. It is not necessary for the human wizard creator to understand the format of the wizard file.